Sound on Sound

Geekdom is a splendid thing. It's fascinating when someone becomes interested in anything to the point where general knowledge sloshes over into obsessive minutiae and detail, with the notable exceptions of spider and scab collecting. It's majorly uncool to collect scabby spiders. Music geeks, though, that's all right. In fact, audio geekery has existed from the time the first caveman decided his monosyllabic grunts sounded better in different parts of the cave. Hell, that's when they really knew how to rock.

Cue rim shot.

The truest trait of the audiophile geek, or any geek, is a preternatural inability to simply let things be. Gotta mess with shit. It's not enough that something works, it has to be tweaked endlessly, in a futile, and therefore perpetuating pursuit of technological perfection. Geeks might strike the matches too close to the gas, but have a blast watching it go up in flames. Bring your car to a geeky mechanic for an oil change, and later find it, and your mechanic in pieces, trying to convince you that he heard a worrisome rattle from your 67 Chevette that he just...couldn't...ignore.

I know a fair amount of acoustic terminology, being a bit of an audiophile myself, but last night, while I was trying to figure out why my newly installed audio codek pack rendered my sound-card mute, I realized that I really don't know diddly. There's no shortage of online forums for geeks, who lose sleep from thinking about whether FLAC lossless files sound better through 16-bit playback, versus M4A files at lower compression rates. Heated debates! Name calling! There's also no shortage of technical psychobabble, to wit, this gem I found that made me want to gouge out my eyes:

Fig.3 Spectrum of 500Hz-spaced multitone signal at –10dBFS, 16-bit linear PCM encoding (linear frequency scale, 10dB/vertical div.).

Fig.4 shows the spectrum of this demanding signal as preserved by lossless coding, in this case the popular FLAC codec (at its slowest "8" setting). To all intents and purposes, it is identical to the spectrum of the original CD. The lossless coding is indeed lossless, which I confirmed by turning the FLAC file back to WAV (LPCM) and doing a bit-for-bit comparison with the signal used to generate fig.3.

Guh? Buh? I might have a clearer understanding of ancient Hebrew. But, maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe. I've seen people's eyes glaze-over while describing the differences in Hz frequencies produced by different record styluses, like they would rather take my record needle to their wrists than listen again, and again, about the mid-range tones on a Badfinger record.

While the technology changes, the belief in a perfectible sound, sweet as choirs of heavenly, scantily-clad nymphs remains fixed. (These, in all likelihood are male geeks). Sound cards, DSP settings, compressors, buffers and decoders are the jargon they employ while they're wondering why their screens just flipped them off and went blank.

Into this realm, I plunged. I had about five hundred songs, in MP3 format, that I was playing through iTunes until a wild hair convinced me to try converting them all into higher quality. Most of the MP3 files I have are 320 kpbs, or kilobytes per second, and refers to transfer (download and upload rates). Here's some really whacked-out geekery: you need to know that there are 8 Kb (kilobits) in every KB (kilobyte). This information should not take up space in your long-term memory.

Thus if your browser is showing that you are downloading a file at 176 KBps you would then multiply 176 times 8 which would translate to 1,408 Kbps. The reverse can be used if your transfer rate is in Kbps then you divide that number by 8 to get your rate in KBps. Example:1400 Kbps divided by 8 equals 176 KBps transfer rate.
If you wanted to know how many bps (bits per second) you are transferring, all you need to do is a straight decimal conversion. Example: 1,408 Kbps would translate to 1,408,000 bps. Don't worry, I'm building to some really funny poop jokes.

An MP3 file, inarguably the preferred format for transferring audio files, compresses music by 1/12th of its original size, which is why most of it sounds so awful. Compression like that, even at 320 kbps, won't represent the fullest sound, and sacrifices greatest on both the high and low ends, creating a hollow-sound, much like listening to Creed. The MP3 is widely used, in no small part to its age, which dates back to the late 60s, when those ever industrious Germans began to develop it, trying to send music through different channels. Those wacky krauts.

I've tried a number of formats, and music players, and all have their strengths. Much as I like the iTunes sleek interface, it doesn't play WAV files (which is what I discovered around 11pm last night), and is a memory beast. Plus, it requires other programs, like Quicktime, which has freeware alternatives, and something called Bonjour, that seems to just sit like a fey Frenchman in my registry. For about six months, I used AIMP 2, which has immaculate sound-quality, but little in the way of customization, which is what drives those in advanced stages of geekery.

Wimamp, one of the first players, and the one I remember used most widely when I was in college (did I ever tell you the story of when I was in college? Things were different then, sonny, you'd better believe...), and it still maintains many supporters. There are numerous things I don't like about it: it seems cluttered, the equalizer isn't very responsive, and the utterly useless 'artist bio' feature that I couldn't disable kept telling me stuff I already knew about Celine Dion. Side note: Celine, why haven't you written? Have you not received my letters?

Okay, this is well earned:

A piece of poop walks into a bar. The bartender says,
“Hey – we don’t serve poop here!”
“Why not?” asked the poop, to which the bartender
replied, “No shit!”

While iTunes is easy on mine eyes, the sound quality sucks eggs. Try not using your equalizer, and tell me you haven't heard better audio coming from a microwave. There are remedies for this, including a program called SRS Audio Essentials, which restores frequencies, and adds sorely needed depth to my collection of Flemish folk music. Weent de zee, de grijze zee!

While I appreciate software enhancements, it should still fall to the music player's programmers to create something that stands alone, with a minimum of outside interference, and cost. There's a difference here between tinkering and overdoing it for its own sake, and it has long been my feeling that too many components hurt sound quality, just as too many hookers spoil a brothel. Like that one? For a few bucks and a couch to crash on, I'm yours, baby. Remember the guy in college who was into BMX bikes, really sugary soda and had that equalizer with a zillion channels that lit up like your drunken uncle when he'd play Duran Duran?

To summarize, that guy now has type two diabetes, Duran Duran still blows, and I wound up converting my MP3 collection into WAV files, nearly maxing my hard drive space, then converting them to a slightly smaller FLAC format, disabling iTunes and reinstalling Foobar 2000, which seems to be what I have done every three months for the past few years. Foobar sounds great, but most importantly, will never sound too great, and geekdom will never die.